Virtualization and cloud technologies have change the IT consumption model fundamentally in recent years. Today, small or large, almost all businesses use a form of cloud computing. Although the adoption started first as in-house “public cloud” deployments in the form of server virtualization for large enterprises, public clouds are becoming inevitable due to the ongoing major shift towards SaaS business models in the software industry and its large players, such as Microsoft and its cloud based Office 365 suite. For current enterprises, cloud adoption is now a matter of “when” rather than “if.”
For public cloud access, two models prevail. In the first, the internet is used at the transmission medium and the data is usually encrypted. In the second, a private, closed network, such as a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is used.
One of the essential benefits of public cloud services is the flexibility, agility and on-demand or pay as you go nature of the services offered. Therefore, it is important to have similar characteristics for the cloud connectivity and the underlying network resources end to end; otherwise, the network itself becomes the bottleneck and barrier for the expected benefits of the public cloud services model. Although there are Software Defined Network (SDN)-based cloud connectivity solutions that provide such cloud connectivity, to date such services mostly rely on underlying private network connections, use Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks as the transmission medium, and work with a single cloud service provider at a time. This approach has limitations in that it does not address customers using other type of networks, does not allow managing multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) at the same time from the same management environment, and does not allow users to determine usage and traffic policies for multiple CSPs.
As an example, AT&T's Netbond solution is an industry leading SDN-based cloud connectivity solution that allows users to connect their AT&T VPN to a CSP. However, Netbond works on the AT&T MPLS VPN (AVPN) as the underlying network and is designed to connect the customer's network to one CSP at a time. These features of Netbond create a challenge when it comes to selling it to customers who do not have AVPN as their primary network. To overcome this challenge, a single node AVPN connection can be created that provides connectivity to Netbonded CSPs. However, when such a connectivity solution is designed with traditional routers and circuits, it does not provide the required agility, flexibility and on demand capabilities, making the gateway itself a bottleneck for the whole architecture.
For example, FIG. 1 illustrates a high level on-demand gateway architecture 10 for access by third party network 12 using AT&T's Netbond 14 as a secure gateway from the customer premises equipment 16 to the cloud ecosystem including, for example, CSPs 18. Netbond 14 provides a single secure physical connection to the CSP 18 and a secure connection to the customer network utilizing SDN that virtualizes the physical circuit and configures the gateway using uCPE, for example. Utilizing a virtualized and SDN based connectivity solution such as AT&T's uCPE and AVPN on demand provides the required flexibility and agility for the cloud connectivity. However, the end user/enterprise customer can only configure the gateway and the CSP connections individually and independently, but not together. Also, such a connectivity solution does not allow for policy based automated routing and capacity allocation/distribution among multiple CSPs as capacity monitoring and adjustments are made manually for each node (customer gateway and Netbond interfaces) continuously and cannot be automated.
Current carrier grade cloud connectivity solutions (such as Netbond) thus allow users to connect their networks to a single cloud at a time using only certain type of networks (such as MPLS). Current solutions for cloud connectivity only work with a single cloud service provider (CSP) at a time. Currently, no VPN connects networks of any type to multiple CSPs with multiple usage policies via multiple connections or monitors usage and applies traffic policies between CSPs. Rather, the existing solutions replace conventional routers and circuits with counterpart SDN functionality. The prior art thus fails to address customers using networks other than MPLS and does not allow the management of multiple CSPs at the same time or management from the same environment with multiple usage policies.
It is thus desirable to develop systems and methods that enable the creation of network agnostic, dynamic, on demand, software defined, policy based cloud connectivity gateways that can be used to connect any kind of network to multiple cloud service providers and cloud networks based on pre-defined user defined policies, regardless of where they are located. The systems and methods described herein address these and other needs in the art.